A look inside Nuwai\'s 1W luxeon light (long w/ pics)
A few weeks ago I picked up a new luxeon flashlight from a Brookstone store. It is a nicely finished aluminum flashlight that is similar to the Streamlight 3AA Luxeon tasklight but instead of 3AA it uses 2x123. It uses the same smooth reflector as the Streamlight 3AA and produces a nice, bright and decently long throwing. The color of the LED however is unacceptably green.. much greener than any of my other luxeon lights.
Recently I found out that Nuwai was the manufacturer of these lights and I managed to get my hands on the ALX-512L which is basically the same thing as the Brookstone light but the body is machined differently. The light arrived yesterday and I was very pleasantly surprised at how bright and white the beam was. I decided to open up the lights to see what kind of bin codes the luxeons had.
Here is a picture of the lights. 512L on the left and Brookstone LS on the right.
Picture of the reflector and LEDs of the two lights.
I heated up the bezels of the lights and used a strap wrench to remove the bezel/reflector unit. Under that you can see a metal retaining ring with a hex pattern on it. Under the ring you can see the luxeon with its star board. I didn't have the hex tool needed to take off the ring so I drilled out two holes in the rings and used a pair of pliers to unscrew them.
Under the ring, the stars are mounted on top of metal discs.
The disc and switch assembly are not secured by anything so the whole thing can be pulled out easily. To my surprise, it looks like the lights run some kind of regulation circuit (?) where originally i thought they were just resistored.
I pryed off stars from the discs and found that the bin codes for the Brookstone and 512L were Q1K and R2K respectively. That explains the nasty green color of the brookstone light i have. Very surprised to see bright ranked luxeons in there (especially the R2K!). Sorry about the blurry pic.. camera just wouldn't cooperate.
I think these lights have a pretty good mod potential. I was thinking maybe switch out Nuwai's circuit for a Badboy 750 and replace the metal disc/star board with a proper heatsink and 5W luxeon.
A few weeks ago I picked up a new luxeon flashlight from a Brookstone store. It is a nicely finished aluminum flashlight that is similar to the Streamlight 3AA Luxeon tasklight but instead of 3AA it uses 2x123. It uses the same smooth reflector as the Streamlight 3AA and produces a nice, bright and decently long throwing. The color of the LED however is unacceptably green.. much greener than any of my other luxeon lights.
Recently I found out that Nuwai was the manufacturer of these lights and I managed to get my hands on the ALX-512L which is basically the same thing as the Brookstone light but the body is machined differently. The light arrived yesterday and I was very pleasantly surprised at how bright and white the beam was. I decided to open up the lights to see what kind of bin codes the luxeons had.
Here is a picture of the lights. 512L on the left and Brookstone LS on the right.
Picture of the reflector and LEDs of the two lights.
I heated up the bezels of the lights and used a strap wrench to remove the bezel/reflector unit. Under that you can see a metal retaining ring with a hex pattern on it. Under the ring you can see the luxeon with its star board. I didn't have the hex tool needed to take off the ring so I drilled out two holes in the rings and used a pair of pliers to unscrew them.
Under the ring, the stars are mounted on top of metal discs.
The disc and switch assembly are not secured by anything so the whole thing can be pulled out easily. To my surprise, it looks like the lights run some kind of regulation circuit (?) where originally i thought they were just resistored.
I pryed off stars from the discs and found that the bin codes for the Brookstone and 512L were Q1K and R2K respectively. That explains the nasty green color of the brookstone light i have. Very surprised to see bright ranked luxeons in there (especially the R2K!). Sorry about the blurry pic.. camera just wouldn't cooperate.
I think these lights have a pretty good mod potential. I was thinking maybe switch out Nuwai's circuit for a Badboy 750 and replace the metal disc/star board with a proper heatsink and 5W luxeon.
